Tuning nitrogen defects and doping sulfur in carbon nitride for enhanced visible light photocatalytic activity

Huilin Xu, Xiangfeng Peng, Jingxuan Zheng, Zhao Wang

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PDF(10740 KB)
Front. Chem. Sci. Eng. ›› 2023, Vol. 17 ›› Issue (1) : 93-101. DOI: 10.1007/s11705-022-2175-x
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Tuning nitrogen defects and doping sulfur in carbon nitride for enhanced visible light photocatalytic activity

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Abstract

Defect construction and heteroatom doping are effective strategies for improving photocatalytic activity of carbon nitride (g-C3N4). In this work, N defects were successfully prepared via cold plasma. High-energy electrons generated by plasma can produce N defects and embed sulfur atoms into g-C3N4. The N defects obviously promoted photocatalytic degradation performance that was 7.5 times higher than that of pure g-C3N4. The concentration of N defects can be tuned by different power and time of plasma. With the increase in N defects, the photocatalytic activity showed a volcanic trend. The g-C3N4 with moderate concentration of N defects exhibited the highest photocatalytic activity. S-doped g-C3N4 exhibited 11.25 times higher photocatalytic activity than pure g-C3N4. It provided extra active sites for photocatalytic reaction and improved stability of N defects. The N vacancy-enriched and S-doped g-C3N4 are beneficial for widening absorption edge and improving the separation efficiency of electron and holes.

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Keywords

g-C3N4 / nitrogen defect / sulfur doping / photodegradation / plasma

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Huilin Xu, Xiangfeng Peng, Jingxuan Zheng, Zhao Wang. Tuning nitrogen defects and doping sulfur in carbon nitride for enhanced visible light photocatalytic activity. Front. Chem. Sci. Eng., 2023, 17(1): 93‒101 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11705-022-2175-x

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 21878214 and 21938009). The authors thank Dr. Yifu Chen (Tianjin University) for his help in analysis of atomic force microscope of this study.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11705-022-2175-x and is accessible for authorized users.

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